I beleive I have enfixinated the Powerbook.
Thesse notes on my restoration process may help someone. I reinstalled most of the system software. Some updates had to wait intil I had fixed the perms and ownership issues, which I did as follows.
In my home folder, I opened Terminal and became root:
sudo su –
as root:
~ root# chown -Rf mwhybark *
~ root# chgrp -Rf staff *
~ root# chgrp -Rf staff *
Certain folders in mwhybark/Library had goofy permissions. They were set to 700, owner read-write-execute and all else barred. Proper Library permissions are 755. I actually hand-corrected one at a time, but I should have said:
~/Library root# chmod -Rf 755 *
I must note that I have not yet thoroughly tested to see if I’m done or not. For example, Missing Sync requests a reinstall; there may be other apps that are similarly wonky.
I hate to ask this so late in the game. Did you ever give Disk Utility, First Aid, Repair Disk Permissions a shot?
No, the initial error was reported by the onboard HW diagnostics, so I just arranged for the replacement.
Post replacement, yes the files and rives have all been DU’ed and DiskWarriored to with an inch of their lives.
The clones are fine as far as the DU / perms stuff goes – the problem is that when cloning ditto randomly changes owners and perms to UID 99, which is a ‘reflective’ user. any file with UID 99 reports that it is owned by the process that queries it for ownership. It seems to me that several directories also were repermed to 700 from 755. the only resolution is manual chgrp, chown, chmod to whatever you think the proper values are. Since the changes are random and affect files belonging to any user rather than only one, there’s no way to determine the proper assignments algorithmically.